Recently I work solely on Linux – Ubuntu, to be precise. I really like this OS, because it has awesome support, and working with is at least as easy as working on a Windows.
Of course everything has pros and cons. And though this OS has pros like low price – imagine that :) – regular updates, abundance of programming and software development tools, it also has pretty big minuses.
Those minuses vary from unavailability of some professional applications for design, modelling and simulations, trough total absence of support for commercial games, to random problems with drivers for Wi-Fi, sound, camera, microphone and others.
It seems that the low price doesn’t compensate those minuses, but maybe all of the pros could do the trick. The greatest plus of a open source operating system is the huge community working on it daily and passionately, always wanting to help you solve your problem.
A few days ago I experienced a great OS breakdown – most of the periphery devices of my machine weren’t working. I had only keyboard, USB ports and display. Everything else was disabled. So instead of panicking and performing complete reinstall (a standard procedure in Windows when something breaks down), I decided to learn something new and perform almost complete reinstall by changing the kernel of the OS with newer.
At first this procedure sounded even more complicated than complete reinstall, because after all you are playing with the insides of your OS which could give you a lot of headaches. However since I needed my Wi-Fi, sound and camera, I was determined to fix my machine no matter what. Therefore why not try something new? After all I could always start again with reinstall.
After a little googling, I found this article, explaining simply the steps that should be performed. The procedure is pretty simple and consists of just 5 commands. The article is about an older version of the kernel, but I bet this algorithm won’t change for eternity.
And since I don’t want to make people click random links on my blog, here are the commands cited in the article above:
$cd /tmp/ $wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.16-utopic/linux-headers-3.16.0-031600-generic_3.16.0-031600.201408031935_amd64.deb $wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.16-utopic/linux-headers-3.16.0-031600_3.16.0-031600.201408031935_all.deb $wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.16-utopic/linux-image-3.16.0-031600-generic_3.16.0-031600.201408031935_amd64.deb $sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.16.0-*.deb linux-image-3.16.0-*.deb
This fixed every problem I had with my OS saving me a bunch of time in fixing stuff I already had fixed right after installing Ubuntu on my computer.
However I wouldn’t go and change the kernel every time I have a minor glitch with my PC. As I said it’s like playing with the insides of the OS (basically this is the OS itself) and it could cause a bunch of other problems.
But if you have already tried everything and the problem still stays, there’s nothing to lose anymore, right?
Greets,